Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Food for Thought

Once, as you probably don’t have to be reminded, King
Belshazzar, that Babylonian bad guy in the Book of Daniel, “praised the gods of
gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone” while carousing with the
stolen tableware of the Temple of Jerusalem—a piece of bad manners for which
God, unwisely left off the guest-list, slew him. This ancient cautionary
anecdote hovers over Burgess’s Any Old Iron, a novel of the first half of the
twentieth century, when (like today) the praising of the wrong gods still
flourished, with ideologies taking the place of idols—Communism,
totalitarianism, nationalism, Anti-Semitism, imperialism, and capitalism. The
uninvited guest at the table of twentieth century is the individual, whom a collectivist
era has no place for—or if it does, the place is on the menu. The two world
wars swallow up liberties and lives on such a scale that an onlooker like David
Jones, the paterfamilias of the book’s circle of main characters, leaves it to
the next generation to try to make sense of, and they can’t. The narrator, a
philosophy student whose sister marries into the Jones family, arrives at a
nihilism so thoroughgoing (“The value of life was a kind of Schopenhauerian
illusion fostered by the survival mechanism,” etc.) that he makes a
career-change and becomes a terrorist: “spatter [people] out of existence with
a brengun and they wouldn’t be missed.” Jones’s son Reginald, as keen as his
father for “an explanation of the kind of world we are living in,” learns moral
relativism from his own government—which punishes him for killing a lone German
in neutral Spain but itself ships thousands of Russians to death in their
homeland—and concludes “there was nothing in the world that was not ambiguous.”
After something more solid than official hypocrisies and personal impermanence
(his marriage is a thing of mutual infidelities, absences, and wrangling) he
fixates on the unearthed sword Caledvwlch, the “demythicised truth” that will
compensate for his unsatisfactory, insubstantial modern life. This, plainly, is
ridiculous. What he is after, like the rest of his generation, is a nourishing
sense of the past, but he comes at it—like the Welsh nationalists—in the wrong
way. “I can’t smell,” he notes at one point. “That’s one thing I’ve lost. The
olfactory nerve damaged in bloody Spain. Cabbages and roses all one.” And—as
neurologists and Marcel Proust teach us—the sense of smell is closely related
to the memory centre of the brain, which an odour can abruptly awaken to forgotten
scenes of the past. “It was a pity that Reg had lost his sense of smell,” the
book’s last sentence runs, and Reg is like most of us.

Unlike
most of us is Daniel Tetlow Jones, who seems soft-headed and cold-hearted, when
in fact he is as wise as his Biblical namesake—unmoved by modern fripperies—and
as devoted and passionate in his own way as his medieval namesake, Dante—with
his sister Beatrix, obviously, as the Beatrice on whom he lavishes his
(Platonic, “brotherly”) love. Dan is a fishmonger, following in the food-trade
footsteps of his father, whose job of cook was no mere livelihood but a “hidden
avocation,” and who once answered with his fists an army cook’s sacrilege of
spitting in the soup. Dan “reek[s] of fish,” has fish “sewn into his flesh,”
spends every spare minute in wartime fishing in European lakes and rivers, and
aspires after the war to nothing but running a fish shop, which to him is a
high office—on a par with Christ “feeding the five thousand, as Dad used to
say.” Christ, indeed, “is a fish,” at least iconographically, and (so the
narrator says) “the smell of fish is good and holy. It was a stinking fish that
Tobias in the Apocrypha used to drive out the demon Asmodeus.” Food, in other
words, is a metaphor for less tangible nourishment, and the implication is that
the modern world is starving for it. “Food was a sort of temporal language, a
link between the generations,” and the ideologies of the modern world want to
break the links to the past that nourish the present: “Now souls are going to
be hammered into copies of an archetype decreed by the great collectives.
America and Russia are the same man with twin hats on.” Dan’s passion, then,
quaintly idiosyncratic in one sense, is heroic in another. He “was always tough
and went his own way,” somebody comments of him, fittingly—for it is the
individualists, if anyone will, who will resist the influences of a
collectivist era. Hence it is recipes, not prayers, that run through the head
of Dan’s father on his deathbed, who dies baffled by the twentieth century but
able at least to console himself that “he had fed people well, and that was
something.”